Games Worth Playing: On Keith Wilson’s “Games for Children”

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I’ve been forced to acknowledge over the years that some people don’t like experimental poetry. Too hard, they say. Or: too cold, all mind, no heart. Too one-note: once you’ve solved the puzzle, you’re done. Nothing ages faster than the avant-garde. 

Keith Wilson’s Games for Children, selected by Rosalie Moffett for the 2024 National Poetry Series, may be the book to change their minds. In this beautifully designed and produced volume of visual poems, Wilson offers moving, compelling, sometimes startlingly original work, which will reward reading and rereading long after the initial pleasure of novelty passes.

Wilson’s first book, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love (Copper Canyon, 2020), established him as a tender, perceptive observer of complex emotions. That book tackles romantic love, parent-child relationships, and, interpenetrating those personal experiences, the ways that broad American conceptions of race enter the private spaces of a family, a relationship, a person’s mind. This emotional content gains heft and particularity from Wilson’s wide-ranging interests in science, art, and mythology. In Fieldnotes, Wilson juxtaposes scientific fact—physics, astronomy—with subjective, malleable, and slippery experiences, as in “String Theory,” where he suggests that the mutual understanding between lovers resembles the mysterious interconnections among subatomic particles. In “Fieldnotes,” the puzzle of literal dark matter, the “free citizen / that passes / unburdened through the field,” stands in contrast to the arbitrary confusion and unfreedom created by American racism, when a cop preparing to handcuff the (Black) speaker asks that speaker’s (white) girlfriend, “are you here of your own free will.” Actual dark matter is impossible to catch, but to the police officer, “even in this light / what we are is obvious.” Wilson also makes creative use of Classical mythology in Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love, including in his treatment of his own identity; for example, he grapples with the ambiguities of mixed-race heritage in several “Minotaur” poems. Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love is a lovely book, placing the minutely personal experiences of love, joy, desire, and ambivalence in dialogue with the larger political and cultural forces that set the conditions of our lives.

Love and the ways love interacts with public constructions of race are central elements of Games for Children, too. But in this book, Wilson, who is also a visual artist and designer of STEM-based video games, raises the stakes still further, mixing in science education, experimental visual arrangements, and fifteen pages of brilliantly helpful yet remystifying notes, to produce a text that manages to be playful, visually appealing, sometimes funny, and sometimes devastating. 

The poems in Games for Children perform a delightful range of formal and visual experiments. There are poems constructed around scientific diagrams (a circuit; the spectrum of invisible and visible light; the “uncanny valley,” the idea that, as Wilson explains, “people are most comfortable when they know for certain that something they are looking at is definitely not human, or when they have been fully convinced something that is not human is human” [106–7]). There is a sonnet. There is a riff on Sappho, which is both an exercise in creative typesetting and deeply, recognizably a Sappho fragment. There is a map of gerrymandered votes, and ekphrastic poems on a Cimabue painting and a 1935 recipe book. All of these visual structures provide the skeleton for Wilson’s lyrical, innovative, sometimes harrowing written descriptions and images. The poem built around the light spectrum gives us the “marrowed light of the moon” and “a sunglow through the webs / of one hand.” The recipe poem describes a break-up in a park, where “the air / was very serious.”  These images hang together from poem to poem, because the overall structure really is like a skeleton, in the sense that each piece is part of a larger, interdependent whole. As varied as these source materials are, the collection is remarkably orderly and coherent; the themes grow and build over the course of the book, and each poem teaches you how to read the ones that follow.

While in any good poem, the form contributes to our interpretation of the content, Wilson’s formal experiments do more than, say, a villanelle. Many of these visual structures are Wilson’s creation; “Line Dance for an American Textbook” repeats the same five-line poem across six pages, each page adding another color-coded alternate path for reading the words. “Self-Portrait as a Bird Through Glass” plays with mirror-image lines of black text, roughly the shape of a bird’s outstretched wings, superimposed on a gray windowpane of text. This text, when you focus on it, turns out to be “I Find Myself Defending Pigeons,” a prose poem from Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love, now reconceived as something for the silhouetted bird to appear against or break through.

These visual components convey specific meanings, much more targeted and allusive than the formal associations of a sonnet. Unsurprisingly, a poem called “Gerrymander for a Black Sentence” needs you to understand something both about gerrymandering and about sentences. But if you don’t already know how to read a circuit diagram, don’t worry: The book will help. Wilson, like any good game designer, includes the information you need to solve his puzzles in the notes at the back. But while his scientific explanations are clear and accessible, the notes are not an answer key; in addition to quick reminders of the definition of a parabola or information about the sounds made by a healthy human heartbeat, they are full of mystery. You may turn to the back to find out what “entamaphobia” means (“the fear of doors”), but you keep turning for the juxtaposition of scientific data, historical narrative, and autobiographical insights that do not simply explain the poems they annotate but rather extend them, continuing the diagram’s curve beyond the page. In the notes to “Uncanny Emmett Till,” for example, Wilson combines the story of the 1955 lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till with Masahiro Mori’s research in robotics. Wilson does not spell out the different ways we might see someone as “not human” (the victim of the lynching is not human to his murderers; the murderers, although human, act in inhuman ways); he trusts us to see the connection. As with any good game, the initial answer is only a starting point for further exploration.

Games for Children is a logical sequence that builds into a beautiful, interactive whole. I gasped with delight reading “The Uncanny Pump-Fake,” when a heartbeat turned into a nightingale, and spent far longer than I had intended arranging and rearranging the possibilities of “Undergod.” I had to put down the book for a while after “Who is There to Eulogize the Tree,” a poem in which thinking about one’s father blends historical memory and personal inheritance. Games for Children extends Wilson’s work on love, on race, and on idiosyncratic individual perception, and creates a collaborative, genre-defying, light-bending marvel. As Wilson reminds us, the word “play” has dozens of meanings: imaginative free play; games that follow rules; theatrical performances; gambling; the irregular  motion of light on water. Games for Children plays and invites us to play in a deeply serious and satisfying fashion, reminding us that at its best, play is not just fun but creation.